Quest cut in. “Guessing someone’s age has never been your strong suit. How old do you think the cutout was?”
“The hooker in the Kit Kat? I’d say she was in her late thirties or early forties.”
“Proves my point,” Quest told the wallahs who had crowded into her office to attend Lincoln’s debriefing. “The girl, the youngest daughter of an old Roman family, is twenty-seven. Her real name is Fiamma Segre. She’s been doing hard drugs for years—that’s why she looks old before her time. Go on with your description of the Saudi.”
Lincoln, resting his elbows on the cane stretched like a span between the two arms of the chair, closed his eyes and tried to summon an image of the Saudi. “He’s charismatic—”
“That’s a load of crap, Lincoln. What do we put on the advisory we send out to our stations? ‘Wanted, dead or alive, one charismatic Saudi.’”
Lincoln’s patience was wearing thin. He was bone tired—the car ride back to são Paolo and the flight back to the States had worn him out. The grilling by Fred and her wallahs was shaping up as the straw that would break the camel’s back. “I’m doing the best I can—”
“Your best needs to be better.”
“Maybe if he were to get some shuteye,” ventured one of the bolder wallahs.
Quest didn’t like to be second guessed. “Maybe if you were to get yourself a posting to another division,” she shot back. “How about it, Lincoln. Give us something concrete to go on. Rack your memory. I’m looking for what you didn’t put into your report.”
From a remote corner of his subconscious, Lincoln dredged up several details he had overlooked when he drafted his report. “Something’s very wrong with the Saudi—”
“Mentally or medically?”
“Medically. He kept scratching at different parts of his body—his upper arm, his chest, his ribs. He seemed to itch all over. His skin was sallow—at first I thought it was because of the dim lighting, but when he stood up to go he passed under a bulb and I saw that he really was yellowish. Another thing: He was sweating even though it wasn’t warm in the room. The perspiration on his forehead appeared to crystalize into a fine white powder.”
Crystal Quest sat back in her chair and exchanged looks with the M.D. on her staff who directed the section that provided psychological and medical profiles of world leaders. “What do you make of that, Archie?”
“There are several possibilities. The start of chronic kidney failure has to be one of them. It’s a condition that could go on for five, ten years without becoming life threatening.”
“He took pills,” Lincoln remembered.
“Small? Big? Did you notice the color or the shape?”
“Oval. Very big, the kind I’d have trouble swallowing. It was dark so I’m not sure of the color. Yellow, maybe. Yellow or orange.”
“Hmmm. If it is chronic kidney failure, a bunch of early treatments come to mind. Could be calcium carbonate and calcium acetate—both are big yellowish pills, oval shaped, taken several times a day to lower the phosphorus level of the blood when the kidney isn’t filtering properly. Diet would be critical—dairy products, liver, vegetables, nuts are high in phosphorus and would need to be avoided.”
Lincoln remembered another detail. “There was a bowl of nuts on the floor between us—he offered them to me but he never helped himself to any.”
For once Quest looked pleased. “That should give us something to go on. A Saudi operating out of Khartoum who may be suffering from chronic kidney failure—if he’s taking pills it would mean he’s been diagnosed by a doctor somewhere, or even undergone clinical tests in a hospital. When you’ve gotten forty winks, Lincoln, I want you to work with one of the artists on the third floor and see if you can’t come up with a portrait. Meanwhile we’ll get our people to collect enough ammonium nitrate to fill a moving van so you can make that rendezvous in New Jersey with the would-be Wall Street bomber, Leroy Streeter.”
“Do I go back to Boa Vista the night of the new moon to sell radioactive waste to the Saudi?” Lincoln asked.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Quest said. “We have a good working relationship with SIDE. We’ll send in a para team to back up the Argentine State Intelligence people. They can encircle Boa Vista the night of the new moon—”
“That’s the fourth of next month,” one of the wallahs noted.
“We’ll let SIDE pick up the Saudi and work him over.” She added with a harsh laugh, “Their methods of interrogation are less sophisticated than ours, but more cost efficient. When they’re finished interrogating him they can feed him to one of Daoud’s alligators and America will have one less enemy to worry about.”
“I want to make sure we get the Italian girl out before all hell breaks look at Triple Border,” Lincoln said. He fingered his cane and rested the tip of it on Crystal Quest’s desk. “I don’t want her to end up like Djamillah in Beirut.”
“You’re a vulgar romantic,” Quest complained. “We’ll sneak her out of there the afternoon of the day we close in on the Saudi.”
“I want you to give me your word.”
The sudden silence in the room roared in Lincoln’s ear. The wallahs had never heard anyone talk to the DDO quite like that. They kept their eyes fixed on their boss so as not to miss the eruption; it would be another tantrum to add to the Crystal Quest saga when the subject came up, as it invariably did, at happy hour. The color drained from her rouged cheeks, her eyes bulged and she looked as if she were about to choke to death on a fish bone stuck in her gullet. Then an unearthly bleat seeped from between her resplendently crimson lips. It took a moment for the people in the room to realize she was laughing. “We’ll get the girl out, Lincoln,” she said as she gasped for breath. “You have my word.”
They met an hour shy of first light in an enormous abandoned hangar under a curve of the Pulaski Skyway, twenty minutes from the mouth of the Holland Tunnel leading to Manhattan. At the rear of the hangar sheets of corrugated roofing had sagged to the ground, creating a makeshift wall that blocked the gusts sweeping in from the coast. Beyond the hangar, in a hard dirt field strewn with thousands of empty plastic bottles, a small campfire burned; twenty or so homeless migrants who picked up work as longshoremen on the Hoboken docks were sitting with their backs against the dilapidated panel truck they used as a mobile bunkroom, drinking coffee brewed over the open fire. Carried on the gusts of damp air, the tinny syncopated clatter of a Mexican mambo band reached the hangar from the panel trucks radio. Inside, Ibrahim bin Daoud scrambled up the narrow metal ladder into the back of the moving van and began inspecting the large burlap sacks, all of them stencilled in black letters “AMMONIUM NITRATE.” Daoud had turned up with a sample of ammonium nitrate in a small jar and started comparing the contents of the sacks against his sample.
Leroy, watching from the ground, called impatiently, “Well?”
“It is ammonium nitrate, all right,” the Egyptian confirmed.
Smiling out one side of his mouth, Leroy hefted a large valise out of the trunk compartment of Daoud’s rented Toyota, set it on the car’s hood and snapped open the lid. Lincoln, leaning on his cane, could see a transparent plastic sack filled with $100 bills bound in yellow wrappers. A six-volt car battery, a coil of electric wire, a small satchel filled with tools and several army surplus percussion caps were also in the valise. Lincoln pointed at the money with his cane. “Count it,” he told the wiry man who had driven the moving van from Pennsauken outside of Camden, the assembly point for the pick-up trucks bringing ammonium nitrate from various parts of the East Coast. Lincoln leaned back against a rusting stanchion to watch; he could feel the holster and small-caliber automatic rubbing against the skin in the cavity at his lower back. Up in the van, Daoud opened each of the burlap sacks in the first two rows to inspect the contents. He played a flashlight into the depths of the van, counting the sacks out loud in Arabic. Satisfied, he backed down the metal ladder and walked over to Lincoln.